by Mike Ashley
Once I had recovered some calm, we talked of the faeries. Mary tells me her visitors are shy, and invariably appear a little before dawn by the druid stone. I distrusted their choice of place but Mary assured me that they are nothing demoniac in appearance or action. She says I am not to picture tiny ladies with butterfly wings, nor little men with beards & green clothes, but strange creatures almost our own height. Accordingly, I shall retire to bed early, and meet them in the morning, to find out what manner of folk they may be.
Your loving sister,
Sophie
Windscour Farm,
Otley,
15th July, 1849
My Dear Joanne,
We arose early, and we walked up to the druid stone in the pearly light before dawn. The wind was sharp, and I was glad of my shawl, but the heather was abloom, smelling of mead, and curlews were calling. Their song always raises a longing in me to fly away. Alas, I have sufficient reason to flee: would that I had a nest to fly to! But you will be agog to hear about the faeries.
Their mode of transportation was most curious. At first I mistook it for one of those curious lens-shaped clouds which form downwind of certain hills, and I only realized my mistake as it flew closer and landed. As God is my witness, Joanne, it flew. It was perhaps a score of feet across, completely smooth, and, most startling of all, completely silent. I was somewhat nervous, as you may well imagine, but I reminded myself that I had faced George in many a rage, and I could face this, and besides, Mary had met her visitors on a dozen occasions, and suffered no hurt.
There came a faint hum, no louder than a spinning wheel, and a door appeared in the side of the faery coach, almost as though an invisible hand drew a pencil line. The door opened, and a ramp extended, and two faeries strolled out.
I had imagined many strange things as I tossed in my bed the previous night, yet these faeries were stranger. Do you remember our stillborn brother, William, who arrived four months too early? A foolish question. I am sure you cannot forget; no more can I. These faeries reminded me forcibly of the poor mite, although while William was no bigger than my hand, these were perhaps four feet tall, and very much alive. I mean they had the same pale skin, and overlarge head, and feeble-looking limbs, and delicate features. Oh but their eyes were different! I have never seen such beautiful eyes, preternaturally large, silver and multifaceted like a fly’s. They wore curious clothes, all of a piece, and yet divided at the legs; I believe they would allow great comfort & freedom of movement.
They approached us, and bowed, hands folded, as Chinamen do. The taller said, “Ik wood stonden in yore grace.”
I blinked & curtsied to cover my confusion.
Mary said, “Do you understand them? Is it not German?”
I replied, “I think it may be Dutch, for it is not German, though it sounds somewhat alike. I shall try to speak with them in German.” Whereupon I directed myself to the visitors saying, “Wilkommen meinen herren. Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”
The faeries looked at each other, and the smaller one said, “We knowen not thys spekyng.”
I turned to Mary. “Of all things most strange! I do believe they are talking Middle English!” In truth they were. As you know, I am a poor scholar, but we contrived a halting conversation. I said, “Ik clepe Sophie,” and they told me they were Zondliss (the larger) and Mica.
They said they were not faeries, but men, “even as yourselne,” from the far distant future, and they were journeying in time! They were most astonished to hear this was the year of our Lord 1849, for they had believed themselves in 1343 and were in great fear of being burned as witches. It took no little time to enlighten them, and I suspect there may have been some confusion with the Mohammedan system of counting years. They claim to come from over a million years in the future. I could scarcely credit it, but as Mary observed, “Consider how slowly the careful breeding of cattle does change their form. If these are indeed men, it would take many, many centuries for them to change so.”
“True,” I said. “And it seems unlikely that men will fly within a thousand years, much less travel in time.”
We were interrupted by the larger traveller bowing again. “Please your Ladyshyp, wir be enfamyned.” Seeing my lack of comprehension he continued, “Wir be soure dystressed & deyen for lak of vitaille.”
“Oh Mary,” I cried, “they are starving!”
Mary hastened home and returned with bread & cheese & milk, but they will need far greater provision for a journey, especially should they lose their way again.
In short we are to meet them again on the morrow, bearing food for them. They must indeed have been sore afraid not to ask for succour here, there, & yonder. Oh Joanne, shall I ask them for passage? My case is desperate, and we could not be followed, but how should I live in the future? And how should Julian? Besides, they are lost by five hundred years and their navigation is clearly not to be trusted.
Your loving sister,
Sophie
Windscour Farm,
Otley,
16th July, 1849, pre-dawn
My Dear Joanne,
I have lain awake most of the night, but I am finally decided. My situation is more desperate than even you know. I am no longer fleeing George, but rather justice, or at least the law of England.
Dearest Joanne, prepare yourself for a shock. George has been dead for nine days.
The day he fractured Julian’s skull he returned home after my letter was posted, & announced he must travel for business, ordering Lucy to pack all Julian’s clothes & his own, but none of mine. He drank a vast deal of port over dinner, slurring his words before we had finished the fish course, and I was alarmed for the consequences for myself. In spite of this, when we retired for the night, I sought an explanation. George said he was “blue-devilled with my fawning on the child,” and the only way I would give him my “proper attention” was by sending our child away. He had found someone who would foster him cheaply enough, & would leave Julian there on the first stage of his journey.
You may imagine my emotions. My heart’s Darling hidden away as though he were born out of wedlock! Do you know how many children so fostered do not survive to their fifth birthday? So many foster parents take the money and spend it on gin rather than food for their charges. I begged. I wept. Nothing availed. He knocked me to the floor.
And then I screamed as George forcibly asserted his marital rights over my body. I was still weeping when he fell into a drunken slumber. I still do not clearly recall what followed. I lost my wits entirely, or perhaps I finally found them. At all events, I untied George’s cravat and retied it in a noose which I then tightened around his neck, with fatal result. He never even awoke.
I remember only too clearly my struggle to get his mortal remains into his travelling trunk. In the morning I feigned normality, telling the servants that George had departed already, and ordered his trunk sent on. I invented the address, and hoped it would be quite some time before anyone opened it. I packed whatever jewellery and money I could find in haste, and we came here, a normal-seeming journey. My first plan was to flee from here to Bavaria, where I might hope to earn my bread by teaching English. Alas, we should be conspicuous, and I fear the law must eventually discover us. For myself, I no longer care, but I took comfort that Julian might be somewhat older by the time I was hanged.
My plan has changed. I have spent hours contriving an account of my troubles (but not my crime!) in Middle English, and I shall beg the time travellers to take me to the end of the millennium. The world should not have become unrecognizable in that time – men should scarcely be flying – but I shall escape.
You would, I am sure, urge caution, and you would be right. What do I know of these strange folk beyond their own account? They are clearly not to be trusted to find the year 2000 or any other. It grieves me to leave you alone. And yet what else am I to do? I pray that the strange woman in Lincoln was right, and that all will indeed turn out for the best. Certainly, I shall need courage, as
she said.
I shall leave this letter in my room. If you receive it, you will know that I could not return to destroy it, and therefore I have gone to the future. Please burn this missive.
Good-bye forever, my heart.
Your loving sister,
Sophie
4 Rue des anemones,
Nantes, France
18th July, 1849
My Dear Joanne,
How shall I begin to explain? I fear my last letter will have distressed you greatly. Although you will receive my letters only two days apart, a score of years has passed for me. But I am well, and I am now forty-eight years old. If you believe I should pay for my crime, I will understand, but I misdoubt that you will find any to believe your tale.
You will have gathered from receiving it that the time travellers did indeed agree to convey us, but not to the destination I anticipated, nor in the manner.
Naturally my Middle English greatly improved with constant use. I shall tell you the whole as I finally understood it, and leave out the many misunderstandings & misconceptions under which I long laboured.
Mica and Zondliss are historians, attempting to research witchcraft. They had a companion, Bordan, who sadly succumbed to the Black Death. I think Bordan must have been the practical member of the crew. Zondliss is pleasant natured & hopelessly incompetent. Mica is sweetness itself and utterly impractical – which accounts for their unplanned detour to 1849. Do you remember Mr Cartlight, who knew everything about Babylon but could never open his own boiled egg without assistance, nor find his handkerchief, nor his spectacles? Mica is cut from the same cloth. They have a wondrous device aboard their time carriage which produces food from wood shavings. This had a cord ending in a curious six-pronged contrivance. Beside it on the wall was a curious six-hollowed depression. I fitted the prongs into the hollows and the contraption immediately began producing roast beef with potatoes & carrots. Since nobody dared to adjust it, we continued with roast beef until Julian indulged his curiosity while none of us observed him, whereupon every meal became poached salmon with spinach. You may not credit it, but one can tire of such luxury, especially for breakfast.
Zondliss endeavoured to bring us to the year he & Mica left, with remarkable incompetence. I was sent to inquire into the date on a number of occasions. You may imagine the reaction I obtained by approaching utter strangers in what they considered Carnival dress, and inquiring, please what year was this? Consequently I once spent a whole shilling on a newspaper to discover the year was 1970. I still preserve the newspaper and it delights me. Flying machines & horseless carriages & men walking on the moon! Truly Joanne, the moon! And yet perhaps more wonderful to me was the situation of women: divorcing husbands, debating in Parliament and campaigning for equal pay with men. I seriously considered staying, but I could scarcely repay Mica & Zondliss with abandonment.
At length we arrived in the far future where everyone looked like Mica & Zondliss. I was confounded to discover that we were still one thousand years from Mica’s time, but then she obtained a competent coachman, and thus we reached her home year.
I declare my entire sojourn was one long perplexity & bewilderment. I was sorely puzzled to distinguish one future-dweller from another, and they arrived with a “pop” from thin air and departed the same way. It gave me palpitations every time, although Julian chuckled with glee. We visited cities floating in the air, and an utterly vast hollow sphere around a sun. I cannot begin to make you understand the strangeness of it all, for I could not begin to understand it myself.
It was obvious that we could not live in such a time. Even had I learned to fit in, where would Julian find a wife? And yet, if we were returned to 1849 I should be hanged, and then what would become of Julian? Finally the notion occurred to me to return to before George’s murder, when there should be no hue & cry. Accordingly I told them I came from 1829, and to 1829 they returned me. I pawned my jewels, and obtained a position as governess to a French family who originally came to Otley to escape Bonaparte. You do not need me to tell you of the trials of a governess’s life, being only too familiar with them yourself. The family regarded me as a servant, and the servants regarded me as a spy for the family.
And then the master’s younger brother visited. Truly Joanne, I did not set out to ensnare him. Having married once under the influence of Mammon, I should scarcely rush to repeat the experiment! I merely thought (and still think) François to be the most kind & charming & agreeable man I had ever met. It seemed extraordinary to me that he was unwed, notwithstanding his shyness. When at last I confided to him some of the truth of my first marriage, he declared that God gave men muscles to protect their families, and not to bully them. On another occasion he opined that a woman’s talents were no less than a man’s, merely distinct. Men have muscles while women have clever, sensitive fingers; men are able to concentrate on one thing with great energy, while a woman can attend to many things at once. Thus man & woman were complete when together. That is how he makes me feel, Joanne, complete.
And so I became Madame Verne, at the cost of no small scandal, and we are still happy and complete together. We had another four children and all are well. At François’s suggestion, we changed Julian’s name to the French equivalent, Jules, to save him from cruel comments when he should begin his schooling.
I wrote my younger self a letter, warning against marriage to George, but I forbore to post it. If I never married George, what should become of Jules? Would he cease to exist? I could not bear to venture such a circumstance. I shudder to think what paradoxes I may have caused by my untruths already. Yet I have just returned from Lincoln where I talked to my younger self as I entered the coach. I remembered how the words gave a glimmer of hope in my darkest days, and I could not forbear.
Jules, of course, has no memory of his natural father, nor of our extraordinary adventures. How could he, at those tender years? And yet he writes the most extraordinary novels of the future.
Your loving sister,
Sophie
DARWIN’S SUITCASE
Elisabeth Malartre
Some hope that even if time travel is not possible, there may be a way of capturing residual images of the past in some kind of time viewer. Witnessing the past and the future as distinct from actually being there was how Charles Dickens ingeniously handled the revelations to Ebenezer Scrooge by the ghosts in A Christmas Carol (1843). A rather more scientific (albeit unrealistic) basis was proposed by the French astronomer Camille Flammarion in Lumen (1872) where he suggested that if you travel faster than light you would be able to witness past events by “historic light”, though of course everything would be seen backwards. However, if a time viewer ever with unlimited scope is invented then all privacy would be lost, an idea that was emphatically demonstrated in such stories as “The Dead Past” (1956) by Isaac Asimov, “I See You” (1976) by Damon Knight and the novel, The Light of Other Days (2000) by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter.
The following story is a double whammy since it uses a time viewer to witness an encounter between a time traveller and an historic personality. Elisabeth Malartre is the wife of author Gregory Benford and has co-authored with him a number of short stories plus the non-fiction Beyond Human: Living with Robots and Cyborgs (2007).
“Our English sphinx moths have proboscides as long as their bodies, but in Madagascar, there must be moths with proboscides capable of extension to a length of between 10 and 11 inches.”
On the Various Contrivances by which British and
Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, and
on the Good Effects of Intercrossing, Charles Darwin, 1862
Sister Solange checked herself just before she nodded off. She stared bleary-eyed at the balky Temporal ViewScreen.
It was before matins, and she was never bright in the early morning. And if someone should find her here . . . the sister who ran the library would never allow this observation during regular research hours. It wasn’t on the Approved
List.
Not many of the sisters were even allowed to touch the machine. Solange was still new to the convent, so it was a great privilege for her to TimeView.
Forty minutes before matins.
She reached out again to the control panel. Maybe this time she’d get it set correctly. She was not very gifted with these new electronics, and far too impatient at their eccentricities. She stared at the crumpled sheet: “Charles Darwin during the writing of The Origin of Species, 1858.”
She ran her finger back and forth over the keyboard in frustration. Still nothing on the screen, but it triggered a recorded warning: “Caution. The Temporal Viewer is a delicate instrument. Please use it carefully.”
She looked at the ancient clock on the wall. Thirty-eight minutes left.
She rapped her knuckles on the screen. The time-code indicator light flickered and a chime sounded. A toneless voice announced, “The new setting is 1866. Please confirm by pressing the return key.”
Sister Solange groaned. “Oh, no, what have I done?”
She reached for the Year Control knob and turned it back. The time-code indicator flickered again. She briefly saw 1859, then it returned to 1866. In frustration she yanked the knob smartly to the left. It came off in her hand.
She stared in horror at the knob. Too late she remembered what Sister Marthe the Librarian had said. There were nodes in the time stream that seemed to attract the Temporal Viewer. Maybe 1866 was one of them.
Sister Solange sighed. Her impatience had gotten her into trouble once again. Penance, surely, maybe even . . . she stopped as the screen cleared suddenly, showing a figure dressed in dark clothes.
“Oh, it’s working. Thank you, Lord. I am so unworthy of your beneficence.” She resolved to do penance anyway.
She squinted at the screen. A middle-aged man was walking with a stick in the countryside. She looked at the paper again. Darwin walked and thought things through in an open field called the Sandwalk near his home in England, Down House.
